Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (74 page)

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

So on the one hand, you have Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, on the other, Benito Mussolini…. Care to choose a side? You might think the right choice would be obvious, but from the perspective of 1983 (and 2003, as well), it looks like the spirit of Mussolini owes Reagan and Bush–and the Republican Party, in general–a big old wet, sloppy kiss.

Lloyd is about to head off into territory that makes Mussolini’s Fascist Italy look a fairy garden tea party. He plans to elaborate on a pet theory of his about how ritual murders tend to occur around open interdimensional portals. A lot of it’s bullshit, if you ask me. Everything is connected (believe me, I know…), but Lloyd seems kind of myopic in the way he draws the lines. Sometimes I think he’s too narrowly focused on the negative, enjoying the view through Aleister Crowley’s satanic-red-tinted glasses a bit too much. It’s like old Milton said: “The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

Anyway, there were other things–good things–happening around 1947, which Lloyd might have mentioned for the sake of balance.

One of those good things was the initial translation of the Gnostic codices from the Nag Hammadi Library, which had been discovered in Upper Egypt about a year earlier, in December of 1945. Philip K. Dick made a big deal out of this in
VALIS
and his Exegesis. It had been revealed to him (or so he claimed) that a creature of pure information–a “plasmate”–had been sealed in an earthenware jar along with the codices and buried under the Egyptian sands sometime around 370 AD. After the rediscovered codices, written in Coptic, were finally translated and read again for the first time in 1947, the dormant plasmate was revived. How? Phil described it this way: “As living information the plasmate travels up the optic nerve of a human to the pineal body. It uses the human brain as a female host… in which to replicate itself into its active form.” That active form–“a human being to which the plasmate had crossbonded”–Phil called a Homoplasmate. He thought he might be one himself.

Phil considered this particular plasmate to be nothing less than the Logos, as embodied by Jesus Christ. The Logos, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the True God were all identical in Phil’s cosmology. So it would follow that the translation of the Nag Hammadi Library had been a very good thing. New Homoplasmates were being created. All the original ones had been killed off by the Romans–or the Empire, in Phil’s terminology (or the Dark Brotherhood, in mine). In Phil’s interpretation of Gnosticism–gleaned from translations of the Nag Hammadi texts–man belongs with the True God in a struggle against this screwed-up world and the angry, deluded Demiurge that created it. The True God “has outwitted the powers of this world, ventured here to help us, and we know him as the Logos.”

(As for why the True God allowed the Demiurge to get us into such a shitstorm of trouble in the first place, Phil could never quite figure that out.)

By now the thought might be dawning that you could be a Homoplasmate, too. Well, sure you could… why not? All you need is some plasmate traveling up your optic nerve. You can even get that here, if I’ve done my homework right. Most likely, though, you already carry the Logos inside you, along with your Divine Spark. The tricky part is learning to listen to it and do what it suggests without your ego getting in the way. In that respect, it’s kind of like working with a daimon. In fact, it’s almost exactly like working with a daimon. The only difference is that a daimon’s interactions will tend to be more personalized and idiosyncratic, because they’re tailored toward the evolution of your soul, whereas the wisdom of the Logos has more universal applications, because it’s a direct connection to the True God. Otherwise, everything that I’ve said about daimons applies.

Look, I know it sounds weird–almost schizophrenic–to suggest that you should get in touch with an alien source of language and images inside your own mind that has a God-like level of wisdom, but seventeen-hundred years ago the Logos was a commonly accepted phenomenon. Ancient philosophers like Heraclitus did everything they could to get in touch with the Logos for guidance and revelations. The authoritative over-reaching of scientific materialism has made that idea seem preposterous, but I can assure you, the Logos exists. In fact, it inspired the Third and Final Rule of Fighting Evil:

Listen to your angels and everything will turn out fine.

By angels I mean guardian angels, or your daimon, or the Logos–whatever you have access to. Try not to listen to demons, which are deranged angels in disguise. Don’t worry… there’s no reason to wuss out here because you’re afraid of dialing a wrong number. With experience you’ll find that demons are as easy to differentiate from angels as Dracula is from Santa Claus–and experience, in the long run, is what incarnating on Earth is all about.

So come on! What are you waiting for? Let’s go out there and kick some demon ass!

STILL MORE ANAMNESIS

A
few miles north of Hearst Castle, near the Piedras Blancas lighthouse, Lloyd pulls the Bentley over to the side of the road in front of a double-hinged gate of rusty scrap iron welded into the shape of two gigantic female breasts. Just beyond the gate, at the end of a dirt path, a small white cottage is perched precariously on the edge of an eroding sea cliff.

“What’s up with the titty gate?” asks Jimmy. It’s the obvious question.

“Linus Pauling owns this place,” Lloyd replies. “He bought it with money from one or the other of his Nobel Prizes. He also has a bigger house further up the road toward Big Sur, so he rents this one out to a metal sculptor named Peter Fels. I thought we might drop in to see Linus if he’s not busy today, but I wanted to give him fair warning by using Peter’s phone first.”

“You’re friends with Linus Pauling?” Gordon asks him.

“I guess you could say that, yes…. I used to get out this way quite often in my younger days. Back then, it was amazing whom you’d run into while soaking in Esalen’s hot tubs or enjoying the sun out on the big deck at Nepenthe. John Lilly, Henry Miller, Robinson Jeffers, Alan Watts… they all lived around here.”

“Cool,” says Gordon. He’s read their books–at least one from each of them.

“Yes, it was an astonishing array of intellects for such a sparsely populated area. And Linus, of course, was always at the top of the heap.” Lloyd gets out of the Bentley and tugs somewhere deep inside the cleavage of the gate. It appears to be locked.

“Maybe you need to unhook a bra strap or something…” D.H. suggests unhelpfully from the open backseat.

Lloyd grabs an iron nipple with both hands and tugs violently, making the gate sway and creak. It still refuses to yield. His palms come away streaked with powdery rust, which he almost wipes on his immaculate tropical-weight worsted slacks, but then he thinks better of it.

“Why don’t you just climb the fence?” Jimmy asks. It sounds like a dare.

Eyeing the barbed wire fence on either side of the gate, Lloyd says petulantly: “You don’t think I can, do you?”

“I didn’t say that.” The implication is that it would be an easy climb for Jimmy, or anyone else in the car, but it might pose more of a problem for someone of Lloyd’s massive girth.

Tentatively, Lloyd sets his foot on the lowest rung of barbed wire and tests it like a ballerina practicing her pliés.
Flex. Squat. Repeat…
. It’s reminding Gordon of those tutu-wearing hippos from Walt Disney’s
Fantasia
(if there was ever a movie designed to hypnotically manipulate the minds of small children, it was that one…). As more of Lloyd’s weight shifts to his raised foot, the barbed wire squeaks against the staples in the wooden posts. Then, all at once, the wire snaps to the ground with a whistling twang. In that same instant, the back seam rips out of Lloyd’s expensive slacks, revealing a fold of maroon-striped silk underpants trapped between his spasmodically clenching butt crack.

“Oh damn!” curses Lloyd while everyone else tries not to laugh.

Gordon gets out of the Bentley. “I’ll go get the guy,” he volunteers, smiling. “What’s his name again?”

“Peter,” Lloyd says while trying–without success–to get a look at his own ass. “You also might run into his wife, Phoebe. Ask her if she has a needle and some thread.”

Examining the colossal rip in Lloyd’s pants, Gordon says, “I’ll ask her, but if she didn’t apprentice with Omar the Tent Maker, I doubt she’ll be able to do much.” Gordon gets over the fence before Lloyd can even scowl at him.

Smelling sage and saltwater mist, Gordon jogs up the path to the cottage and knocks on the screened front porch. No one answers. A brilliant blue Steller’s Jay greets him with a gruff, gargling squawk from the edge of the roof. Otherwise, the dusty white cottage seems almost supernaturally tranquil.

Circling around to the side of the cottage, Gordon peers through a window and sees a large oil painting on the opposite wall. It depicts naked caricatures of Adam and Eve being banished, shame-faced and skulking, from a curly-leafed Paradise by the radiant pointing hand of God. They’re heading toward the aisles of a tacky discount department store with a Blue Light Special in progress. A title in jagged pink fuchsia is scrawled across the painting’s lower left corner: Expulsion to K-Mart. To the right is the artist’s signature: Phoebe Palmer. Peter’s wife is apparently a painter. A good one.

“Gordon? Anybody there?” Lloyd calls out from the other side of the fence.

“I guess nobody’s home,” Gordon turns and tells him, heading back up the path.

Seeing Phoebe’s painting and the gate of iron tits has led Gordon back to thoughts about his mother. He wonders if she’ll kick him out of the house when he gets back from his trip. If she does, he tells himself it doesn’t matter. He has enough money saved to rent his own apartment, if that’s how she wants to play it. Even if he didn’t have the money, he’d still find a way to get by somehow. There’s no good reason for him to keep putting up with Cynthia’s chronically pissed-off mother routine now. He’s not afraid of her. He doesn’t care if she cuts him out of her life forever. The only thing he ever wanted from her was the one thing she never had to offer: a mother’s love.

“Onward and upward,” Lloyd says as Gordon climbs back into the Bentley and slams the door with a satisfying thump.

Of course, there’s Derek to think about…
Gordon tells himself as he takes one last look at the iron titty gate before the Bentley pulls away. He wants to make sure his little brother doesn’t grow up cowed and stunted by their anger-crazed mother. It won’t be easy. We’ve all been culturally conditioned to defer to authority for thousands of years, even though history clearly shows that those we entrust to protect us often end up abusing us. But hopefully, Gordon will be able to help Derek find a way to open the gates to his own unique version of freedom–just as Lloyd, in his perverse way, has been helping him.

With that thought and a strange jolt of concentrated focus, Gordon makes the iron gates swing open in Linus Pauling’s driveway.

No one else sees it happen, and Gordon is too stunned to point it out to anyone as the Bentley races along the road and the gates recede behind them. Besides, it could have just been the wind… just like it could have been his mother who stopped her own hands from slapping him at the start of the trip, possibly because she didn’t want to embarrass herself in front of Gordon’s friends.
Psychic powers? Remote influencing? Maybe I just believe my own bullshit,
he thinks.

A second ago he was elated, but now Gordon just feels exhausted and depressed.

Lloyd gives him a sidelong glance while pretending to concentrate on his driving. “I saw what you did in the rearview mirror,” he mutters so that only Gordon can hear him. “Don’t worry… the exhaustion is a normal part of the process. You’ll get used to it.”

“So I really did that? Opened the gates?” Gordon mutters back.

“You bet.”

Gordon’s mood improves substantially.

A stiff breeze off the ocean hits the side of the Bentley and almost peels off Lloyd’s toupee. “Has anyone heard the story about how Linus Pauling won a Nobel Peace Prize because Robert Oppenheimer tried to fuck his wife?” Lloyd asks brightly, glancing over his shoulder into the backseat.

“Lloyd, you’re more full of
loco
stories than any
pendejo
speed freak I ever met,” Twinker says. “Why don’t you just calm down some?”

“We still have miles to go and this will be educational,” Lloyd says, patting his toupee back into place as if it were a frisky terrier. “Besides, what better rivalry can you think of? It’s the Father of Molecular Biology versus the Father of the Atomic Bomb.”

“
Tyrannosaurus Rex versus Megalodon: Who would win?
” Jimmy says, recalling the childhood mind games that he and Gordon used to play.

“Oppenheimer would win,” Skip decides. “The Atomic Bomb would blow away Molecular Biology every time. No problem.”

“But so far, it hasn’t–at least not on a worldwide scale as of yet,” Lloyd points out. “And Oppenheimer didn’t win, if it’s the Nobel Prize we’re talking about. But Linus won it.
Twice.”

“And those guys were wife-swappers?” D.H. asks.

“No, nothing like that…” Lloyd demurs, “but they were once close friends. They worked together at Caltech in the late-1920s, where they were planning to mount a joint inquiry into the nature of the chemical bond. Oppenheimer had a generous, flamboyant nature in those days. He’d given his cherished boyhood rock collection to Linus and he wrote fawning poems to him about Dante, mineralogy, and pederasty. It’s more likely that he had the hots for
Linus
, rather than for Linus’ wife, Ava Helen.”

“That’s perverted,” Skip snorts with more amusement than disgust.

“Be that as it may,” Lloyd continues, “one day in 1929 while Linus was away at work, our suave future Father of the Atomic Bomb invited Ava Helen to go away with him for a diddling down in Mexico. Ava Helen–
that flirt
–was secretly flattered, but she rebuffed him and dutifully informed her husband of Oppenheimer’s sleazy sexual advances. Linus felt he had no choice but to promptly end their friendship.”